The Scribosphere Carnival is a weekly discussion from a variety of screenwriting blogs around a rotating theme.

Michael Patrick Sullivan over at Red Right Hand has posted this week’s Scribosphere Carnival topic which is CRITICISM.

This week’s Scribosphere topic is how we each take criticism, or how we don’t, who do we seek out to provide it, and what do we do with it once we have it, how we give it, or, you know…whatever.

Criticism.

What a scary concept.

People might not like what I’ve written. People might downright hate what I’ve written. People might even “nothing” what I’ve written. Heck. People might love what I’ve written but think the entire last act is garbage. How does a relative newbie such as myself prepare to handle the onslaught of feedback? The popular consensus is that our writing is somehow our “baby.” Babies are cute, and our own babies are amazeballs to the nines. Why would anyone want to hurt our baby? Don’t they understand all the work that went into creating this baby? THINK ABOUT THE GOSH DARN BABY!

Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong and our writing is instead the gestating, tentacled, face-hugger from Prometheus. Maybe for us to grow as writers and not die horrible deaths we need to get some distance between us and what we write. I’m not talking ten feet away, either; I’m talking about hauling ass out of that medical bay and barricading the Mothra-flipping door with everything in plain sight. Or maybe tricking an Engineer to come in and get attacked by the–

Okay. So I didn’t think this example all the way through, but you get the idea. I’m still wrestling with how to receive and synthesize feedback on my writing on a day-to-day basis. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to hear that my stuff needs work or that it needs to be tweaked like so. All I can do is work at that distance thing and just know that the feedback is there to help me grow and improve as a writer. And I hope that when the shoe is on the other foot I can give feedback that is both helpful and useful.